Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 680

Beginning another year, and again taking a short retrospect, we are glad to announce to our readers that Chambers's Journal continues to increase in circulation, and is to all appearance more acceptable as a Family Magazine than ever. This is encouraging. We feel satisfied that the resolution to exclude wild sensational fiction from our pages, however much that kind of literature may be in demand, has met with very general approval. We shall accordingly, as in the past twelve months, endeavour to sustain the reputation of the work on the basis which secured for it a high meed of popular favour pretty nearly half-a-century ago. We might be excused for indulging in some exultation, that our small periodical, without adventitious aid – without professing to lean upon great names, either as writers or patrons – has so successfully kept its ground for so long a period of time. But, while offering all proper acknowledgments for the esteem in which the work is apparently held, content ourselves with saying that now, as heretofore, no effort will be spared by the Editors of Chambers's Journal to maintain it as a weekly and monthly miscellany of recreative and instructive literature – a literature as free from political or sectarian bias as from aught that is morally objectionable.

notes

1

They played long-whist in those times; we should say of course 'at four' nowadays.

2

Round my House; Notes on Rural Life in France. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. London, Seeley.

3

Journal, No. 578, January 23, 1875.

4

Though in commerce the Beche-de-mer is called 'fish,' it belongs to a family of invertebrate animals, and in consequence occupies a comparatively low rank in the scale of life. This delicacy is also termed trepang.